Ilham Halib is the co-founder of 7AY Coworking, the stylish, airy, and art-filled workspace we utilized during our month in Rabat, Morocco. Walking into 7AY is like peeking into Ilham's personality, somehow combining her love of art and poetry with her global life experiences. I got to know Ilham a bit over communal lunches at 7AY, and wanted to know more about how she came to open this unique space, and where her passion for developing this kind of supportive professional community came from. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were 17, what did you want to be?

If I remember well, I wanted to be an ice skater. I’m not at all good at this sport, but I wanted to be an ice skater. And after that I wanted to be a banker. I learned everything about banks. I took pictures of banks, printed them out, and taped them to my wall. I knew everything about the services of banks, the rates, the financial products, etc. I was not a capitalist. It’s absolutely not sexy at all to think about money, and I still hate money, I don’t buy anything. I’m almost anti-capitalist. But at that time, I think I had the intuition that maybe if I was working at a bank, I could control the money and write the money system, and then do something else with it. That’s why I chose the economics option at school, but then I didn’t do that at all at university.

What is the When I Was 17 Project?

When I Was 17 is a blog series dedicated to collecting the varied stories of people's career paths, what they envisioned themselves doing when they were teenagers and how that evolved over the course of their lives. I started this project with the goal of illustrating that it's okay not to know exactly what you want to do when you're 17; many successful people didn't, and these are a few of their stories.